The Educated Marketer

2017 Pinterest Essentials

Welcome back to our 2017 Social Media Blog Essentials. If you’ve been reading along with us, you’ve gained insight and knowledge into how to best use the most popular social media sites to increase engagement, build your brand and sell your products and services.

Today we turn our focus to Pinterest, an online bulletin board where people can search and discover new ideas and “pin” them to their boards to look at later. And here’s a fun fact—according to SocialMediaToday, Pinterest users spend 100% more money than average internet users.

Interested yet?

Overview:

Pinterest was founded in 2010, and the first month had 5000 followers. Today, Pinterest boasts 175 million active monthly users and 75 billion pins.

According to ExpandedRamblings, the platform skews heavily female with women making up 85% of users. Millennials make up 63% of the demographic and 55% of U.S. shoppers name Pinterest as their favorite social media platform. Overall, there are 63.2 million users in the United States and the average pinner spends 14.2 minutes on the site.

The beauty of Pinterest, is that each pin includes a link to the original image on your website. And according to Hubspot, 95% of images are pinned or repinned from websites. These valuable inbound links will directly drive traffic to your website.

If you aren’t using Pinterest, you might be leaving money on the table. Pinterest reports 87% of users have made a purchase because of the site and 93% of users have used the site to plan a future purchase.

But how does it stack up again other social media platforms?

PostPlanner says the half-life of a pin is 1600x longer than that of a Facebook post (its takes 3 ½ month for a pin to get 50% of its engagement) and Forbes points out that Pins are 100x more spreadable than a Tweet.

What to post:

First things first, you will need to create a Pinterest Business Page. You can either convert your existing Pinterest account into a business page (all your pins will be kept), or log out and create a whole new page. You will need to determine what is best for you company, however, most of the time creating a completely new page will make the most sense.

A business account with get you a few extra features. You’ll have access to Rich Pins, which contain more information than other pins and can include real-time pricing and direct links to your website. You’ll also get Pinterest Analytics and be able to build widgets and create save buttons.

Once you’ve created your account, you will approach it very similarly to how you would use a personal account. You will want to set up different boards and in addition to creating your own pins, you will want to repin from other boards as well.

What type of content?

SocialMediaExaminer points out that most social media networks share things that have already happened. Pinterest is where people go to make plans or achieve something. Create content that inspires and informs.

When to post:

According to SocialMediaWriting, 2 to 4 pm and 8pm to 1am are the best times to pin. Saturdays are the best day.

Length of Posts:

The length of posts isn’t extremely crucial since you are basically linking back to a website of the time with an image from the website. It still will be useful however, to keep the 500-character limit per post in mind. In addition, SocialMarketingWriting suggests you name your boards in 17 characters or less, the amount that can be viewed on an unexpanded board.

Frequency of Posts:

Buffer suggests pinning consistently 5x a day. When they conducted their own experiment, they went from pinning 2x a day to more than 10x and saw a 150% increase in engagement.

Common Fails:

Don’t try to affiliate your brand with Pinterest

Pinterest urges you to include a Pinterest Badge, linking back to you Pinterest account in a prominent place on your website. However, they are very concerned that companies may try to affiliate themselves with Pinterest to gain followers. For this reason, the company has put together specific guidelines to prevent this from happening.

Pinterest does not allow companies to us their logo, or language like, “trending on Pinterest” or “trending pins”. They also ask that when linking to Pinterest, businesses always link to their specific company page URL.

Don’t just repin content

Did you know that 80% of pins are re-pins? You can get more repins and generate more traffic to your website if you focus on pinning content directly from websites vs. just clicking the repin icon. In addition, the Huffington Post points out that this will also help you verify websites (because there are a lot of spammers out there) before you pin it for you audience and this practice will make your boards fresh and unique to your followers.

Don’t use just any image

With Pinterest, sometimes all a user really sees is the picture as they are scrolling. It’s important an image relays much of your content as possible, which may include adding text to the image itself.

In addition, you’ll need to make sure your photo is the right size. Sociallysorted suggests if you are creating an image, aim for 735 pixels in width. You’ll also want to go more tall than wide, avoiding square images. But not too tall--images between 2:3 and 4:6 get 60% more pins than taller ones.

Lastly, if you are using an existing image, make sure you have the appropriate permissions to use that image on Pinterest.

Best Practices:

Do create several boards and pins before you share

Before you broadcast to the world that you are on Pinterest, create some boards and pins so that when they go to check out you, you’ve got something going on already. Constant Contact suggests building three types of boards—one about your products and services, a board designed to help and a board that’s just fun. These three topic areas will all contribute to your promotions in a unique way.

Once you have a foundation, go ahead and share away. You can include a badge on your website, include the information in marketing materials, send an email blast and promote the news via other social media platforms. ConstantContact says adding a Pinterest badge to your website will help drive traffic to your site and remind your visitors to pin your content.

Do be selective about what you pin

Your goal with your Pinterest account is to best serve your audience. You will be creating original content to inspire them and help them achieve their dreams. You want to be sure that you only repin top quality content and make sure that it ties into what your company does. If you are a hotel, pin travel tips. If you run a boutique, pin fashion tips.

SocialMediaExaminer also points out to check information for accuracy and confirm the message aligns with your brand and values. Also, with outside content, create your own unique caption, making it relevant to what your audience is looking for.

Do create a call-to-action (CTA)

Be sure to edit the caption, including a link to your website and even including a call-to-action when appropriate. Pinerly says that including a CTA can increase engagement by up to 80%.

You can include a “pin it now” button or a “buy now” button. Hurrat.com says that the “buy now” button works on iPhone and iPad and allows users to purchase products with a credit card or Apple Pay without leaving Pinterest.

Do you focus on creating and finding pins for the week all at once? Buffer for Pinterest is a service that will help you schedule those pins and space them out over a period of time. The service starts at $10 a month and also measures the performance of your Pins.

Pixlr is a free online photo editor that you can use to edit your photos (including adding text) so that they best represent the content you are promoting.

Now that you’ve got the skinny on Pinterest, stop by, set up your account and get pinning.

This blog post is part of our Social Media Essentials Series 2017, an 8-part blog series aimed at demystifying social media promotion, one platform at a time. Each post will focus on a separate social media application offering the skinny on updated ways to best use each site for promotion. We’ll let you know about who you will reach, what to post, when to post, examples of best practices and more. We will feature a new post every two weeks. Follow the Educated Marketer to stay up to date on our series.

It's a social world and you can’t afford not to be active on social media -- it’s where your prospective customers are. Download our Social Media guide to learn more.

This blog post is part of our Social Media Essentials Series 2017, an 8-part blog series aimed at demystifying social media promotion, one platform at a time. Each post will focus on a separate social media application offering the skinny on updated ways to best use each site for promotion. We’ll let you know about who you will reach, what to post, when to post, examples of best practices and more. We will feature a new post every two weeks. Follow the Educated Marketer to stay up to date on our series.